Read The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Online

Authors: Steven Pinker

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The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (128 page)

Social psychologists have identified other gimmicks of moral disengagement, and Bandura’s participants rediscovered most of them. They include minimizing the harm (“It would not hurt them too bad”), relativizing the harm (“Everyone is punished for something every day”), and falling back on the requirements of the task (“If doing my job as a supervisor means I must be a son of a bitch, so be it”). The only one they seem to have missed was a tactic called advantageous comparison: “Other people do even worse things.”
²⁹⁷

There is no cure for ideology, because it emerges from many of the cognitive faculties that make us smart. We envision long, abstract chains of causation. We acquire knowledge from other people. We coordinate our behavior with them, sometimes by adhering to common norms. We work in teams, accomplishing feats we could not accomplish on our own. We entertain abstractions, without lingering over every concrete detail. We construe an action in multiple ways, differing in means and ends, goals and by-products.

Dangerous ideologies erupt when these faculties fall into toxic combinations. Someone theorizes that infinite good can be attained by eliminating a demonized or dehumanized group. A kernel of like-minded believers spreads the idea by punishing disbelievers. Clusters of people are swayed or intimidated into endorsing it. Skeptics are silenced or isolated. Self-serving rationalizations allow people to carry out the scheme against what should be their better judgment.

Though nothing can guarantee that virulent ideologies will not infect a country, one vaccine is an open society in which people and ideas move freely and no one is punished for airing dissenting views, including those that seem heretical to polite consensus. The relative immunity of modern cosmopolitan democracies to genocide and ideological civil war is a bit of support for this proposition. The recrudescence of censorship and insularity in regimes that are prone to large-scale violence is the other side of that coin.

PURE EVIL, INNER DEMONS, AND THE DECLINE OF VIOLENCE

At the beginning of this chapter I introduced Baumeister’s theory of the myth of pure evil. When people moralize, they take a victim’s perspective and assume that all perpetrators of harm are sadists and psychopaths. Moralizers are thereby apt to see historical declines of violence as the outcome of a heroic struggle of justice over evil. The greatest generation defeated the fascists; the civil rights movement defeated the racists; Ronald Reagan’s buildup of arms in the 1980s forced the collapse of communism. Now, there surely are evil people in the world—sadistic psychopaths and narcissistic despots obviously qualify—and there surely are heroes. Yet much of the decline in violence seems to have come from changes in the times. Despots died and weren’t replaced by new despots; oppressive regimes went out of existence without fighting to the bitter end.

The alternative to the myth of pure evil is that most of the harm that people visit on one another comes from motives that are found in every normal person. And the corollary is that much of the decline of violence comes from people exercising these motives less often, less fully, or in fewer circumstances. The better angels that subdue these demons are the topic of the next chapter. Yet the mere process of identifying our inner demons may be a first step to bringing them under control.

The second half of the 20th century was an age of psychology. Academic research increasingly became a part of the conventional wisdom, including dominance hierarchies, the Milgram and Asch experiments, and the theory of cognitive dissonance. But it wasn’t just scientific psychology that filtered into public awareness; it was the general habit of seeing human affairs through a psychological lens. This half-century saw the growth of a species-wide self-consciousness, encouraged by literacy, mobility, and technology: the way the camera follows us in slow-mo, the way we look to us all. Increasingly we see our affairs from two vantage points: from inside our skulls, where the things we experience just
are
, and from a scientist’s-eye view, where the things we experience consist of patterns of activity in an evolved brain, with all its illusions and fallacies.

Neither academic psychology nor conventional wisdom is anywhere close to a complete understanding of what makes us tick. But a little psychology can go a long way. It seems to me that a small number of quirks in our cognitive and emotional makeup give rise to a substantial proportion of avoidable human misery.
²⁹⁸It also seems to me that a shared inkling of these quirks has made some dents in the toll of violence and has the potential to chip away at much more. Each of our five inner demons comes with a design feature that we have begun to notice and would be wise to acknowledge further.

People, especially men, are overconfident in their prospects for success; when they fight each other, the outcome is likely to be bloodier than any of them thought. People, especially men, strive for dominance for themselves and their groups; when contests of dominance are joined, they are unlikely to sort the parties by merit and are likely to be a net loss for everyone. People seek revenge by an accounting that exaggerates their innocence and their adversary’s malice; when two sides seek perfect justice, they condemn themselves and their heirs to strife. People can not only overcome their revulsion to hands-on violence but acquire a taste for it; if they indulge it in private, or in cahoots with their peers, they can become sadists. And people can avow a belief they don’t hold because they think everyone else avows it; such beliefs can sweep through a closed society and bring it under the spell of a collective delusion.

BETTER ANGELS

[It] cannot be disputed that there is some benevolence, however small, infused into our bosom; some spark of friendship for human kind; some particle of the dove, kneaded into our frame, along with the elements of the wolf and serpent. Let these generous sentiments be supposed ever so weak; let them be insufficient to move even a hand or finger of our body; they must still direct the determinations of our mind, and where every thing else is equal, produce a cool preference of what is useful and serviceable to mankind, above what is pernicious and dangerous.

—D avid Hume,
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals

I
n every era, the way people raise their children is a window into their conception of human nature. When parents believed in children’s innate depravity, they beat them when they sneezed; when they believed in innate innocence, they banned the game of dodgeball. The other day when I was riding on my bicycle, I was reminded of the latest fashion in human nature when I passed a mother and her two preschoolers strolling on the side of the road. One was fussing and crying, and the other was being admonished by his mother. As I overtook the trio, I heard a stern Mommy voice enunciating one word: “EMPATHY!”

We live in an age of empathy. So announces a manifesto by the eminent primatologist Frans de Waal, one of a spate of books that have championed this human capability at the end of the first decade of the new millennium.
¹Here is a sample of titles and subtitles that have appeared in just the past two years:
The Age of Empathy, Why Empathy Matters, The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, The Science of Empathy, The Empathy Gap, Why Empathy Is Essential (and Endangered), Empathy in the Global World,
and
How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy
. In yet another book,
The Empathic Civilization
, the activist Jeremy Rifkin explains the vision:

Biologists and cognitive neuroscientists are discovering mirror-neurons—the so-called empathy neurons—that allow human beings and other species to feel and experience another’s situation as if it were one’s own. We are, it appears, the most social of animals and seek intimate participation and companionship with our fellows.
Social scientists, in turn, are beginning to reexamine human history from an empathic lens and, in the process, discovering previously hidden strands of the human narrative which suggest that human evolution is measured not only by the expansion of power over nature, but also by the intensification and extension of empathy to more diverse others across broader temporal and spatial domains. The growing scientific evidence that we are a fundamentally empathic species has profound and far-reaching consequences for society, and may well determine our fate as a species.
What is required now is nothing less than a leap to global empathic consciousness and in less than a generation if we are to resurrect the global economy and revitalize the biosphere. The question becomes this: what is the mechanism that allows empathic sensitivity to mature and consciousness to expand through history?
²

So it may have been the quest to expand global empathic consciousness, and not just a way to get a brat to stop picking on his sister, that led the roadside mom to drill the concept of empathy into her little boy. Perhaps she was influenced by books like
Teaching Empathy, Teaching Children Empathy,
and
The Roots of Empathy: Changing the World Child by Child,
whose author, according to an endorsement by the pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton, “strives to bring about no less than world peace and protection for our planet’s future, starting with schools and classrooms everywhere, one child, one parent, one teacher at a time.”
³

Now, I have nothing against empathy. I think empathy is—in general though not always—a good thing, and I have appealed to it a number of times in this book. An expansion of empathy may help explain why people today abjure cruel punishments and think more about the human costs of war. But empathy today is becoming what love was in the 1960s—a sentimental ideal, extolled in catchphrases (what makes the world go round, what the world needs now, all you need) but overrated as a reducer of violence. When the Americans and Soviets stopped rattling nuclear sabers and stoking proxy wars, I don’t think love had much to do with it, or empathy either. And though I like to think I have as much empathy as the next person, I can’t say that it’s empathy that prevents me from taking out contracts on my critics, getting into fistfights over parking spaces, threatening my wife when she points out I’ve done something silly, or lobbying for my country to go to war with China to prevent it from overtaking us in economic output. My mind doesn’t stop and ponder what it would be like to be the victims of these kinds of violence and then recoil after feeling their pain. My mind never goes in these directions in the first place: they are absurd, ludicrous, unthinkable. Yet options like these clearly were not unthinkable to past generations. The decline of violence may owe something to an expansion of empathy, but it also owes much to harder-boiled faculties like prudence, reason, fairness, self-control, norms and taboos, and conceptions of human rights.

This chapter is about the better angels of our nature: the psychological faculties that steer us away from violence, and whose increased engagement over time can be credited for declines in violence. Empathy is one of these faculties, but it is not the only one. As Hume noted more than 250 years ago, the existence of these faculties cannot be disputed. Though one sometimes still reads that the evolution of beneficence is a paradox for the theory of natural selection, the paradox was resolved decades ago. Controversies remain over the details, but today no biologist doubts that evolutionary dynamics like mutualism, kinship, and various forms of reciprocity can select for psychological faculties that, under the right circumstances, can lead people to coexist peacefully.
⁴What Hume wrote in 1751 is certainly true today:

Nor will those reasoners, who so earnestly maintain the predominant selfishness of human kind, be any wise scandalized at hearing of the weak sentiments of virtue, implanted in our nature. On the contrary, they are found as ready to maintain the one tenet as the other; and their spirit of satire (for such it appears, rather than of corruption) naturally gives rise to both opinions; which have, indeed, a great and almost indissoluble connexion together.
⁵

If the spirit of satire leads me to show that empathy has been overhyped, it is not to deny the importance of such sentiments of virtue, nor their indissoluble connection to human nature.

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